The following article is appearing in the Orange County (CA)
Register on Sunday, September 19, 1993, and an upcoming issue of
Gun Week. Reproduction on computer bulletin boards is permitted for
informational purposes only.

Copyright (c) 1993 by J. Neil Schulman. All other rights reserved.

PRIVATE FIREARMS STOP CRIME 2.5 MILLION TIMES EACH YEAR, NEW
UNIVERSITY SURVEY CONFIRMS

By J. Neil Schulman

Gary Kleck, Ph.D. is a professor in the School of Criminology and
Criminal Justice at Florida State University in Tallahassee and author of
"Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America" (Aldine de Gruyter, 1991), a
book widely cited in the national gun-control debate. In an exclusive
interview, Dr. Kleck revealed some preliminary results of the National
Self- Defense Survey which he and his colleague Dr. Marc Gertz conducted
in Spring, 1993. Though he stresses that the results of the survey are
preliminary and subject to future revision, Kleck is satisfied that the
survey's results confirm his analysis of previous surveys which show that
American civilians commonly use their privately-owned firearms to defend
themselves against criminal attacks, and that such defensive uses
significantly outnumber the criminal uses of firearms in America.

The new survey, conducted by random telephone sampling of 4,978
households in all the states except Alaska and Hawaii, yield results
indicating that American civilians use their firearms as often as 2.5
million times every year defending against a confrontation with a
criminal, and that handguns alone account for up to 1.9 million defenses
per year. Previous surveys, in Kleck's analysis, had underrepresented the
extent of private firearms defenses because the questions asked failed to
account for the possibility that a particular respondent might have had to
use his or her firearm more than once.

Dr. Kleck will first present his survey results at an upcoming
meeting of the American Society of Criminology, but he agreed to discuss
his preliminary analysis, even though it is uncustomary to do so in
advance of complete peer review, because of the great extent which his
earlier work is being quoted in public debates on firearms public policy.

The interview was conducted September 14-17, 1993 by J. Neil
Schulman, a novelist, screenwriter, and journalist who has written
extensively on firearms public policy for several years.

Readers may be interested to know that Kleck is a member of the ACLU,
Amnesty International USA, and Common Cause, among other politically
liberal organizations. He is also a lifelong registered Democrat. He is
not and has never been a member of or contributor to the NRA, Handgun
Control Inc., or any other advocacy group on either side of the
gun-control issue, nor has he received funding for research from any such
organization.

SCHULMAN: Dr. Kleck, can you tell me generally what was
discovered in your recent survey that wasn't previously known?

KLECK: Well, the survey mostly generated results pretty
consistent with those of a dozen previous surveys which generally
indicates that defensive use of guns is pretty common and probably more
common than criminal uses of guns. This survey went beyond previous ones
in that it provided detail about how often people who had used a gun had
done so. We asked people was the gun used defensively in the past five
years and if so how many times did that happen and we asked details about
what exactly happened. We nailed down that each use being reported was a
bona fide defensive use against a human being in connection with a crime
where there was an actual confrontation between victim and offender.
Previous surveys were a little hazy on the details of exactly what was
being reported as a defensive gun use. It wasn't, for example, clear that
the respondents weren't reporting investigating a suspicious noise in
their back yard with a gun where there was, in fact, nobody there. Our
results ended up indicating, depending on which figures you prefer to use,
anywhere from 800,000 on up to 2.4, 2.5 million defensive uses of guns
against human beings -- not against animals -- by civilians each year.

SCHULMAN: Okay. Let's see if we can pin down some of these
figures. I understand you asked questions having to do with just the
previous one year. Is that correct?

KLECK: That's correct. We asked both for recollections about
the preceding five years and for just what happened in the previous one
year, the idea being that people would be able to remember more completely
what had happened just in the past year.

SCHULMAN: And your figures reflect this?

KLECK: Yes. The estimates are considerably higher if they're
based on people's presumably more-complete recollection of just what
happened in the previous year.

SCHULMAN: Okay. So you've given us the definition of what a
"defense" is. It has to be an actual confrontation against a human being
attempting a crime? Is that correct?

KLECK: Correct.

SCHULMAN: And it excludes all police, security guards, and
military personnel?

KLECK: That's correct.

SCHULMAN: Okay. Let's ask the "one year" question since you
say that's based on better recollections. In the last year how many
people who responded to the questionnaire said that they had used a
firearm to defend themselves against an actual confrontation from a human
being attempting a crime?

KLECK: Well, as a percentage it's 1.33 percent of the
respondents. When you extrapolate that to the general population, it
works out to be 2.4 million defensive uses of guns of some kind -- not
just handguns but any kind of a gun -- within that previous year, which
would have been roughly from Spring of 1992 through Spring of 1993.

SCHULMAN: And if you focus solely on handguns?

KLECK: It's about 1.9 million, based on personal, individual
recollections.

SCHULMAN: And what percentage of the respondents is that?
Just handguns?

KLECK: That would be 1.03 percent.

SCHULMAN: How many respondents did you have total?

KLECK: We had a total of 4,978 completed interviews, that is,
where we had a response on the key question of whether or not there had
been a defensive gun use.

SCHULMAN: So roughly 50 people out of 5000 responded that in
the last year they had had to use their firearms in an actual
confrontation against a human being attempting a crime?

KLECK: Handguns, yes.

SCHULMAN: Had used a handgun. And slightly more than that had
used any gun.

KLECK: Right.

SCHULMAN: So that would be maybe 55, 56 people?

KLECK: Something like that, yeah.

SCHULMAN: Okay. I can just hear critics saying that 50 or 55
people responding that they used their gun and you're projecting it out to
figures of around 2 million, 2-1/2 million gun defenses. Why is that
statistically valid?

KLECK: Well, that's one reason why we also had a five-year
recollection period. We get a much larger raw number of people saying,
"Yes, I had a defensive use." It doesn't work out to be as many per year
because people are presumably not remembering as completely, but the raw
numbers of people who remember some kind of defensive use over the
previous five years, that worked out to be on the order of 200 sample
cases. So it's really a small raw number only if you limit your attention
to those who are reporting an incident just in the previous year.
Statistically, it's strictly the raw numbers that are relevant to the
issue.

SCHULMAN: So if between 1 percent to 1-1/3 percent of your
respondents are saying that they defended themselves with a gun, how does
this compare, for example, to the number of people who would respond that
they had suffered from a crime during that period?

KLECK: I really couldn't say. We didn't ask that and I don't
think there are really any comparable figures. You could look at the
National Crime Surveys for relatively recent years and I guess you could
take the share of the population that had been the victims of some kind of
violent crime because most of these apparently are responses to violent
crimes. Ummm, let's see. The latest year for which I have any data,
1991, would be about 9 percent of the population had suffered a personal
crime -- that's a crime with personal contact. And so, to say that 1
percent of the population had defended themselves with a handgun is
obviously still well within what you would expect based on the share of
the population that had suffered a personal crime of some kind. Plus a
number of these defensive uses were against burglars, which isn't
considered a personal crime according to the National Crime Survey. But
you can add in maybe another 5 percent who'd been a victim of a household
burglary.

SCHULMAN: Let's break down some of these gun defenses if we
can. How many are against armed robbers? How many are against burglars?
How many are against people committing a rape or an assault?

KLECK: About 8 percent of the defensive uses involved a sexual
crime such as an attempted sexual assault. About 29 percent involved some
sort of assault other than sexual assault. Thirty-three percent involved
a burglary or some other theft at home. Twenty-two percent involved
robbery. Sixteen percent involved trespassing. Note that some incidents
could involve more than one crime.

SCHULMAN: Do you have a breakdown of how many occurred on
somebody's property and how many occurred, let's say, off somebody's
property where somebody would have had to have been carrying a gun with
them on their person or in their car?

KLECK: Yes. We asked where the incident took place.
Seventy-two percent took place in or near the home, where the gun wouldn't
have to be "carried" in a legal sense. And then some of the remainder,
maybe another 4 percent, occurred in a friend's home where that might not
necessarily involve carrying. Also, some of these incidents may have
occurred in a vehicle in a parking lot and that's another 4 percent or so.
So some of those incidents may have involved a less-regulated kind of
carrying. In many states, for example, it doesn't require a license to
carry a gun in your vehicle so I'd say that the share that involved
carrying in a legal sense is probably less than a quarter of the
incidents. I won't commit myself to anything more than that because we
don't have the specifics of whether or not some of these away-from-home
incidents occurred while a person was in a car.

SCHULMAN: All right. Well, does that mean that approximately
a half million times a year somebody carrying a gun away from home uses it
to defend himself or herself?

KLECK: That's what it would imply, yes.

SCHULMAN: All right. As many as one-half million times every
year somebody carrying a gun away from home defends himself or herself.

KLECK: Yes, about that. It could be as high as that. I have
many different estimates and some of the estimates are deliberately more
conservative in that they exclude from our sample any cases where it was
not absolutely clear that there was a genuine defensive gun use being
reported.

SCHULMAN: Were any of these gun uses done by anyone under the
age of 21 or under the age of 18?

KLECK: Well we don't have any coverage of persons under the
age of 18. Like most national surveys we cover only adults age 18 and up.

SCHULMAN: Did you have any between the ages of 18 and 21?

KLECK: I haven't analyzed the cross tabulation of age with
defensive gun use so I couldn't say at this point.

SCHULMAN: Okay. Was this survey representative just of
Florida or is it representative of the entire United States?

KLECK: It's representative of the lower 48 states.

SCHULMAN: And that means that there was calling throughout all
the different states?

KLECK: Yes, except Alaska and Hawaii, and that's also standard
practice for national surveys; because of the expense they usually aren't
contacted.

SCHULMAN: How do these surveys make their choices, for
example, between high-crime urban areas and less-crime rural areas?

KLECK: Well, there isn't a choice made in that sense. It's a
telephone survey and the telephone numbers are randomly chosen by computer
so that it works out that every residential telephone number in the lower
48 states had an equal chance of being picked, except that we deliberately
oversampled from the South and the West and then adjusted after the fact
for that overrepresentation. It results in no biasing. The results are
representative of the entire United States, but it yields a larger number
of sample cases of defensive gun uses. They are, however, weighted back
down so that they properly represent the correct percent of the population
that's had a defensive gun use.

SCHULMAN: Why is it that the results of your survey are so
counter-intuitive compared to police experience?

KLECK: For starters, there are substantial reasons for people
not to report defensive gun uses to the police or, for that matter, even
to interviewers working for researchers like me -- the reason simply being
that a lot of the times people either don't know whether their defensive
act was legal or even if they think that was legal, they're not sure that
possessing a gun at that particular place and time was legal. They may
have a gun that's supposed to be registered and it's not or maybe it's
totally legally owned but they're not supposed to be walking around on the
streets with it.

SCHULMAN: Did your survey ask the question of whether people
carrying guns had licenses to do so?

KLECK: No, we did not. We thought that would be way too
sensitive a question to ask people.

SCHULMAN: Okay. Let's talk about how the guns were actually
used in order to accomplish the defense. How many people, for example,
had to merely show the gun, as opposed to how many had to fire a warning
shot, as to how many actually had to attempt to shoot or shoot their
attacker?

KLECK: We got all of the details about everything that people
could have done with a gun from as mild an action as merely verbally
referring to the gun on up to actually shooting somebody.

SCHULMAN: Could you give me the percentages?

KLECK: Yes. You have to keep in mind that it's quite possible
for people to have done more than one of these things since they could
obviously both verbally refer to the gun and point it at somebody or even
shoot it.

SCHULMAN: Okay.

KLECK: Fifty-four percent of the defensive gun uses involved
somebody verbally referring to the gun. Forty-seven percent involved the
gun being pointed at the criminal. Twenty-two percent involved the gun
being fired. Fourteen percent involved the gun being fired at somebody,
meaning it wasn't just a warning shot; the defender was trying to shoot
the criminal. Whether they succeeded or not is another matter but they
were trying to shoot a criminal. And then in 8 percent they actually did
wound or kill the offender.

SCHULMAN: In 8 percent, wounded or killed. You don't have it
broken down beyond that?

KLECK: Wound versus kill? No. Again that was thought to be
too sensitive a question. Although we did have, I think, two people who
freely offered the information that they had, indeed, killed someone.
Keep in mind that the 8 percent figure is based on so few cases that you
have to interpret it with great caution.

SCHULMAN: Did anybody respond to a question asking whether
they had used the gun and it was found afterward to be unjustified?

KLECK: We did not ask them that question although we did ask
them what crime they thought was being committed. So in each case the
only incidents we were accepting as bona fide defensive gun uses were ones
where the defender believed that, indeed, a crime had been committed
against them.

SCHULMAN: Did you ask any follow-up questions about how many
people had been arrested or captured as a result of their actions?

KLECK: No.

SCHULMAN: Did you ask any questions about aid in law
enforcement, such as somebody helps a police officer who's not themselves
an officer?

KLECK: No. I imagine that would be far too rare an incident
to get any meaningful information out of it. Highly unlikely that any
significant share of these involved assisting law enforcement.

SCHULMAN: The question which this all comes down to is that we
already have some idea, for example from surveys on CCW license holders,
how rare it is for a CCW holder to misuse their gun in a way to injure
somebody improperly. But does this give us any idea of what the
percentages are of people who carry a gun having to use it in order to
defend himself or herself? In other words, comparing the percentage of
defending yourself to the percentage of being attacked, does this tell us
anything?

KLECK: We asked them whether they carried guns at any time but
we didn't directly ask them if they were carrying guns, in the legal
sense, at the time they had used their gun defensively. So we can
probably say what fraction of gun carriers in our sample had used a gun
defensively but we can't say whether they did it while carrying. They
may, for example, have been people who at least occasionally carried a gun
for protection but they used a gun defensively in their own home.

SCHULMAN: So what percentage of gun carriers used it
defensively?

KLECK: I haven't calculated it yet so I couldn't say.

SCHULMAN: So if we assume, let's say, that every year
approximately 9 percent of people are going to be attacked, and
approximately every year that 1 percent of respondents used their guns to
defend against an attack, is it fair to say that around one out of nine
people attacked used their guns to defend themselves?

KLECK: That "risk of being attacked" shouldn't be phrased that
way. It's the risk of being the victim of a personal crime. In other
words, it involved interpersonal contact. That could be something like a
nonviolent crime like purse snatching or pickpocketing as well. The fact
that personal contact is involved means there's an opportunity to defend
against it using a gun; it doesn't necessarily mean there was an attack on
the victim.

SCHULMAN: Did you get any data on how the attackers were armed
during these incidents?

KLECK: Yes. We also asked whether the offender was armed.
The offender was armed in 47.2 percent of the cases and they had a handgun
in about 13.6 percent of all the cases and some other kind of gun in 4.5
percent of all the cases.

SCHULMAN: So in other words, in about a sixth of the cases,
the person attacking was armed with a firearm.

KLECK: That's correct.

SCHULMAN: Okay. And the remainder?

KLECK: Armed with a knife: 18.1 percent, 2 percent with some
other sharp object, 10.1 percent with a blunt object, and 6 percent with
some other weapon. Keep in mind when adding this up that offenders could
have had more than one weapon.

SCHULMAN: So in approximately five sixths of the cases
somebody carrying a gun for defensive reasons would find themselves
defending themselves either against an unarmed attacker or an attacker
with a lesser weapon?

KLECK: Right. About five-sixths of the time.

SCHULMAN: And about one-sixth of the time they would find
themselves up against somebody who's armed with a firearm.

KLECK: Well, certainly in this sample of incidents that was
the case.

SCHULMAN: Which you believe is representative.

KLECK: It's representative of what's happened in the last five
years. Whether or not it would be true in the future we couldn't say for
sure.

SCHULMAN: Are there any other results coming out of this which
are surprising to you?

KLECK: About the only thing which was surprising is how often
people had actually wounded someone in the incident. Previous surveys
didn't have very many sample cases so you couldn't get into the details
much but some evidence had suggested that a relatively small share of
incidents involved the gun inflicting wounds so it was surprising to me
that quite so many defenders had used a gun that way.

SCHULMAN: Dr. Kleck, is there anything else you'd like to say
at this time about the results of your survey and your continuing analysis
of them?